CTP Data Management & Analytics Flashcards

Which replication strategy provides the highest read scalability in a distributed database while accepting eventual consistency?

Answer: Asynchronous multi-replica replication with read replicas

Asynchronous replication with multiple read replicas allows read traffic to be distributed across nodes, improving scalability at the cost of strict consistency.

In a data warehouse, what is the difference between a fact table and a dimension table?

Answer: Fact tables store measurable events; dimension tables store descriptive attributes

Fact tables contain quantitative metrics (e.g., sales amounts) linked by foreign keys to dimension tables that hold descriptive context (e.g., product name, date).

What is a common use case for Apache Kafka in a data analytics architecture?

Answer: Real-time data streaming and event-driven pipeline ingestion

Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform used to ingest and process real-time data streams for analytics pipelines.

Which data governance principle ensures that data has a designated owner responsible for its quality and access?

Answer: Data stewardship

Data stewardship assigns accountability for data quality, definitions, and access policies to specific individuals or teams within an organization.

What does the CAP theorem state about distributed systems?

Answer: A distributed system can only guarantee two of: Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance

The CAP theorem proves that distributed systems must sacrifice one of the three guarantees—Consistency, Availability, or Partition tolerance—during a network partition.

A CTP professional is designing a data pipeline that must handle schema evolution without breaking downstream consumers. Which strategy is most appropriate?

Answer: Using a schema registry with backward-compatible schema evolution

A schema registry enforces compatibility rules so that producers can evolve schemas without breaking existing consumers that rely on older versions.